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Loveroom, The Airbnb For Attractive People, Is Doing The Fake Startup Game Wrong

No surprise here. As I predicted and Forbes’ Kashmir Hill reported, the too-sleazy-to-be-real “startup” Loveroom, which purported to be an Airbnb clone that allowed you to “rent your room to attractive people” isn’t so much a company as a whipped-together landing page.

In short: It’s not real.

Still, you gotta give Loveroom “founder” Josh Bocanegra credit: He did manage to fool a nice swath of the tech media (and my Facebook feed) into thinking that his product was either already a thing or coming soon. In fact, as Hill reported, Bocanegra’s project has received so much attention that he now plans on making it a reality.

Sorry, Team Loveroom, you’re doing it wrong, and have already committed two cardinal sins of aspiring startups that all but assure Loveroom will remain little more than a digital art project or thought experiment. From here on out, I’m speaking just to Bocanegra. But readers: Feel free to eavesdrop. These are good tips for all startups and founders.

1) Don’t burn the press. Oh Josh, as you’ve discovered, the press can basically will an idea into being. Buzz is your friend. But here’s the thing, those journalists who went to press with stories strongly suggesting your idea was in fact a company? Many of them spoke to you. And from the stories I’ve read that feature your quotes, you seem to have done nothing to correct their assumptions about Loveroom. I wasn’t privy to your conversations and can not say with certainty that you actively misled anybody, but the second they had you on the phone or email asking you questions that implied Loveroom was more than it was, you should have corrected them.

You didn’t. And as a result, it’s fair to say that, even if the burnt journalists don’t have axes to grind, you may have credibility issues going forward.

2) Don’t announce deals before they happenThe juiciest part of Hill’s story on Loveroom? When you give up your entire game plan for turning Loveroom into a product. Apparently, it’s all predicated on the idea that either Airbnb will somehow allow you access to their database so you can build an “overlay”, or a hired programmer will be able to “scrape” it all from the site.

As Hill reports:His plan is to do a kind of overlay on the Airbnb site where people can register with an Airbnb account and then list themselves as single (a checkbox not offered via Airbnb), ala Padmapper to Craigslist. However, he noted that he’s been told that Airbnb doesn’t have an API and that he’s going to need a developer to help him do a script to scrape info from the site. He has not yet run this plan by Airbnb.

Uh, no.

Here’s the thing. Billion-dollar-valuation companies without open APIs who don’t have a history of opening up their databases aren’t going to welcome a non-existent, potentially competitive, certainly sleazier clone of themselves to tap in. It just doesn’t work that way. And I can all but assure you that hiring a developer to “scrape info from the site” will either run counter to their terms of service or be something very simple for them to shut down with a few programming tweaks (or lawsuits).

Either way, you might want to wait until you talk to Airbnb about this before going public with your plans. You’ve basically pinned yourself into a corner. When this doesn’t work (and it won’t), any strategic pivots are going to look like Plan Bs. Besides, it’s just not good form to go public with any hopeful deals or partnerships before they are solidified—or even discussed with the other company.

In short, I wish you luck, Josh. You obviously know how to come up with ideas that get attention. That’s rare. And I sincerely hope you can parlay this talent into creating a startup that succeeds. I just don’t think it’ll be an “Airbnb for attractive people”.

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